
So many bugs during the Christmas holidays and the turn of the year, alongside our media preparations for the CES 2025 in Las Vegas: The sheer number of disruptions and error reports unfortunately made it impossible for us to publish all incidents in real time. Nevertheless, we are not losing any reports – every single bug is documented at all times. One by one, we will now work through these publications, until we can return to the latest weekly status in our upcoming reports. If you have any ideas or comments, we look forward to your feedback and direct interaction. Thank you very much!
During the week (December 30, 2024 to January 5, 2025), a number of technical irregularities and service issues arose in our daily work, affecting various areas: from the Apple ecosystem and online shopping to travel bookings and hotel stays. From a journalistic perspective, the picture is as follows:
1) Apple Environment
• Apple TV: Users complained about outages of livestream services (e.g., Sport1) and a faulty GUI display. Turning the Apple TV off and on again only led to a continuous loop (“Ladeschnecke”).
• macOS 15.2 and iMessage: On the Mac, the Messages app only synchronized after sending a test message. On the iPad, delayed FaceTime notifications caused confusion, while the Control Center on the iPhone occasionally flickered.
• iCloud Collaboration: Sharing folders sometimes took extremely long; some recipients could not access a shared folder at all.
• AirPods Pro: When connected to Apple TV, the music could no longer be paused via the remote control after the TV automatically went into standby.
2) Online Shopping & Credit Cards
• ON (shoe brand): Several bugs in their ordering and chat system. There was no option to export the chat, tracking codes led to error messages, and address validation apparently accepted incorrect locations (e.g., “Weinböhla” instead of Las Vegas). In addition, credit card payments for online shopping (Sparkasse and Advanzia) were declined.
• Further customer experience: Users criticized the lack of any mention of fraud settings and poor communication regarding complaints.
3) Travel & Transport
• Deutsche Bahn / DB: At Dresden-Neustadt station, an elevator remained out of service, with no visible information or response from staff. Also, an ICE (No. 1554) unexpectedly ended its journey already in Leipzig, forcing an additional transfer.
• Lufthansa: Adding extra baggage or upgrading to business class at short notice was not possible online. Instead, passengers had to call a hard-to-find hotline to provide payment and booking data over the phone. Calls were sometimes interrupted, and a referral to other airlines came without a specific contact number.
• Mobile Internet: At the Semperoper in Dresden, the connection (Vodafone and Telekom) was apparently unusually slow.
4) Hospitality & Service
• Hilton: Various shortcomings affected the stay. A dusty room fan, a lack of humidifiers, and language barriers with the cleaning staff led to negative feedback. In addition, there was a peculiar situation in the hotel restaurant, where bread was available but not sold separately to guests.
5) Hardware Issues
• Rapoo wireless keyboard: Keystrokes were recognized unreliably.
• Dictation feature on the MacBook Air M1 (Sequoia 15.2): Despite the microphone being enabled in macOS settings, dictation did not work.
